‘There you are, Mrs Roxburgh, dear,’ Mrs Oakes announced on the Friday morning, ‘I have put up your things.’
They had been made into a clumsy parcel, not that they were her belongings any more than anything ever had been.
The two women sat together awhile on the veranda. They were so attached to each other, and trusting, it was natural that they should hold hands, Mrs Oakes’s dry, spongy palm, and Mrs Roxburgh’s, which fate had worked upon to the extent that the original plan was long since lost and the future become indecipherable.
It did not occur to the farmer’s wife to speculate over any of this; to her the hand was simply precious; so she squeezed it, and in some degree to avoid the unavoidable, confided, ‘I do declare I forgot to boil up the chickens’ mash.’
‘Then let us go together’, suggested Mrs Roxburgh, equally unpurposed, ‘to do what you forgot.’
But they remained sitting. The morning had become too drowsy. For two pins, this daughter would have laid her head upon the mother’s bosomy apron, drawn by its smell of laundering and flour. Mamma had never smelt thus, but of lavender water and violet cachous, and the chalk she continued puffing into the fingers of gloves she did not use after leaving Lady Ottering’s service.
Such fragile excuses and delicately scented delusions could hardly hope to survive: the women were startled out of their thoughts by the sudden jingle and champing of metal, grinding of wheels, and soon after, piecemeal voices.
Mrs Oakes grew raucous. ‘’Tis the carriage, Ellen!’ as though it could have been other than what they both feared.
The good woman pounded at such a bat towards the yard the veranda threatened to become disjointed.
Mrs Roxburgh sat forward, hunched against whatever was prepared for her. For the moment this was wrapped in silence and the stench of leather and horses’ sweat. Mrs Oakes seemed to have withdrawn from her life; there was nobody to offer guidance to one whom Mrs Roxburgh herself had long accepted as a lost soul.
Somebody was at last approaching, by way of a frail bridge it sounded, suspended over the chasm of silence. The footsteps were not those of her friend. Truly Mrs Oakes had been persuaded to abandon her. Mrs Roxburgh folded her hands in her lap, in one of those attitudes she had learnt and then forgot. If she could but remember her lessons, together with some of the more helpful tags of common prayer.
The stranger’s feet were treating the boards not so much with actual disdain as an amused, gliding irony. It was the step of one who might always express disbelief at finding herself where she happened to be.
A not unpleasing, genteel contralto was aimed at the target. ‘Mrs Roxburgh? I’ve come to keep you company on the drive down to the settlement. You may not remember,’ the woman, or rather, the indisputable lady reminded, ‘we have met before — which makes the occasion — for me at least — a most agreeable coincidence.’
So Mrs Roxburgh could no longer postpone investigating this individual, acquaintance as well as harbinger, and was faced with a figure dressed in brown, finical from the toes of her boots to the bridge of her noticeably cutting nose.
‘Do you not recall’, she asked more gently, abashed perhaps by tales she had heard as well as her reception at this humble farm, ‘how we met, the day our mutual friends the Merivales paid you the visit, on board ship? Surely you must?’ She was reduced to begging.
Out of the turmoil of emotions, of storm and shipwreck, of death and despair, of trust and betrayal, Mrs Roxburgh did begin to recollect the brown woman’s accusing nose.
‘Yes,’ she sighed. ‘I do, of course — Miss …?’ The lady could hardly have lost her maidenhead for frightening off the men or tearing out the entrails of those unwise enough to approach.
‘Scrimshaw,’ the beak slightly squawked to fill the gap in a deficient memory.
The eyes, dark enough to daunt the casual opponent, were piercing as deep as Mrs Roxburgh’s own. Finally the women seemed to understand each other.
Miss Scrimshaw extended a hand firmly encased in brown kid. ‘Mrs Roxburgh,’ she advised, ‘I do not wish to push you unduly, but suggest that for practical reasons we start without delay, to arrive before nightfall. In these parts, as I know from several months residence, one cannot leave too much to chance.’
‘I leave it to you,’ Mrs Roxburgh murmured, who had spent her whole life in other people’s hands.
Miss Scrimshaw hurried on. ‘Look!’ she exclaimed with such vehemence that the spray flew out of her mouth. ‘Mrs Lovell, who is kindness itself, has sent you this.’ The emissary began disentangling the string from a cardboard box she carried suspended from her second hand. ‘She realized that you were not provided with a bonnet, and did not wish you to travel bareheaded.’
With a conjurer’s flourish Miss Scrimshaw whisked out of the box what must have been a woman’s last fling at girlhood, a gauzy, but somewhat squashed affair from which the nodding pansies, daisies, or whatever, had been thoughtfully stripped, and replaced by a broad band of crape, the pretty ribbons by crape streamers, and over all a veil, likewise crape.
Miss Scrimshaw bared her teeth to guide the novice towards an enthusiasm she seemed to lack.
Then Mrs Roxburgh agreed, ‘Yes, Mrs Lovell is kind, she is most thoughtful,’ and settled the bonnet on her head, and drew the veil to disguise her face.
While Miss Scrimshaw was organizing their departure Mrs Roxburgh searched without success for Mrs Oakes. In the end it seemed like almost everything, immaterial.
‘Such good people, I understand,’ Miss Scrimshaw remarked as they took their places in the unsprung carriage.
Mrs Roxburgh could not answer. The escorts spurred their mounts, and the latter sidled and dropped their dung. Only as they wound their way downhill did she raise her widow’s veil to glance back, and there was her friend standing like a crudely modelled statue at one corner of the primitive barn. It struck Mrs Roxburgh that everything which one most respects, and loves, is rapt away too soon and too capriciously. Then the scents of laundering and baking, not to say the smell of boiled mash, rushed back, and she started sneezing.
She lowered her veil, thankfully.
Miss Scrimshaw said, ‘There is something in the air. I do so sympathize. I am affected by it regularly. Oh dear yes, what we suffer! But must, I suppose, put up with it.’
So they ground on, and were rolled at dusk along the tracks linking the scattered buildings which composed the settlement at Moreton Bay.
‘You see, Mrs Roxburgh, I was correct in my calculations,’ Miss Scrimshaw announced and laughed.
Mrs Roxburgh was more than ever glad of the veil falling from the brim of her bonnet. It dimmed lights and concealed thoughts. But would she hear the sounds she most dreaded? For the moment she did not.
The Commandant’s house was set in what appeared by twilight a spacious and well-planted garden from which heady, dusk-induced perfumes were wafted through the windows of their bone-breaker of a vehicle. The residence itself, at this hour less a house than a series of illuminations, was revealed as an amorphous sprawl behind jutting verandas, the whole effect suggestive of practical comfort rather than official presumption.
Mrs Roxburgh felt drawn to the house. She would have liked to burrow in without being received, and to remain there unnoticed. But this was not to be. The Commandant himself had been waiting for them, and had come out, and was standing on the steps, a fine figure of an officer, obviously enjoying the power and benefits which the command of a remote but unimportant outpost brings.